I am not conservative. Reality is conservative.

I'm just observant.

If you are reading this, chances are you have at some point been asked the question, probably via social media: ‘what happened to you, man? You used to be cool.’ Or, a variant, ‘have you been hacked?’ Or, another variant: “I used to like you but…’ 

(It is interesting to note, as a sidebar, how these questions are almost never asked in person. Face-to-face, we tend to put aside our differences and skirt around controversy, at least in my experience.)

We live in an age of summary group judgement. And while I’m old enough to remember that this was started by the American right — Dixie Chicks and the Iraq War, anyone? — it’s indisputable that the current American left has got apostate-hunting down to a fine, sharp, art.

Perhaps because I write in a publication of one, I have not suffered unduly at the hands of the thought police. I had very little reputation to lose. But I exist in an awkward reality of having many of people that I love dearly hold very different views, not to mention pretty much every single person I once looked up to in a professional capacity. So I often have conversations, alone in my head, trying to justify myself, to myself.

And this was my realisation the other day, after two people wrote to me with very similar accusations, basically that I was pretending to still be liberal but I was actually conservative. 

But here’s what I realised: I’m not conservative. Reality is conservative. I’m merely observing that fact. 

This cathedral was not built by liberal values or in compliance with human resources best practices.

I have suspected this for a long time - perhaps even my whole life, even when I lived a very un-conservative lifestyle. But it was listening to Leigh Janet Marshall tell her story that really brought it home to me. Because the traumas she experienced were mostly a result of a highly liberal worldview where all traditional roles and moral boundaries had been taken away. Her childhood without those roles and moral guardrails left her vulnerable in a multitude of ways. Many of the things liberals hold dear, it turns out, can be very, very harmful. Reality is conservative.

What do I mean, exactly, by reality? I will try to explain, in terms that are devoid of overtly political terms.

Below are some examples of reality.

Children need stable homes with a mother figure and a father figure. 

Children crave connection with blood relatives and love to hear family lore. Their innate connections to family members are unique and not replaceable with adults in schools or a wider community.

No one — not children, not adults — can actually change their sex. They can only pretend that they did.

Laissez-faire sexual morality harms men, women and children, to a catastrophic degree.

Every bit of comfort and shelter and safety that we all enjoy is completely dependent on the often back-breaking, dangerous, physical labour of men.

People cannot survive on material provisions alone. Give a person a roof over their head and enough food to eat, for free, but take away everything else — community, skill and purpose, God, nationhood or tribe— that person will go insane. The converse is also true, a person can live with terrible hardship if he or she has a purpose or belief.

Having too much is just as bad as not having enough. (Sometimes it’s worse.)

Self-control is probably the most important quality to develop, and one that is found the least in children and young people. Maturing is, by definition, a process of developing self-control over our desires and our emotions.

We have raised at least two generations of young people without traditional authority figures (stern teachers, strict parents, watchful grandparents), and we are witnessing a calamitous outbreak of mental illness and crippling dysfunction in young people. 

If you agree that these are statements about our shared reality, then extrapolate from that. In our current environment, which political side are you going to find yourself? The chaotic, permissive lifestyles that have become normalised on the left would not be tolerated in the homes of many of the liberal families I know, but there is social pressure to tolerate and even celebrate it outwardly, and to disavow the public figures who espouse true values because they are on the wrong side.

When I was thinking over these realities, I remembered that years ago I did one of those personality tests. I went back to look at the results. I was very high in openness, aesthetics and extroversion — all solid predictors of a liberal political orientation. I am also very low in contentiousness, which, the test states, manifests as a personality “not compelled to do things by the book” and “free of guilt, shame and self-disgust.” And those things very much land within my more freewheeling side, and also are a predictor of a liberal outlook. And I’m “exceptionally low” in orderliness, which means, yes, I’m messy, but also I “see the world in shades of grey, never in simple, black-and-white,” and “much less likely to be political conservative.” Ha!

The way I’ve lived my life has been in concordance with these dominant traits of mine. At at times reckless, willing to throw off safety and security to instead seek an interesting, creative life. But growing older has meant a commensurate need for increased order in my life, simply because like all humans whose innate programming wasn’t overridden by dysfunction, trauma or ideology, I matured. I realised this was happening in the most mundane of ways. When my son was little, at a time in my life when my marriage was crumbling and neither I nor my ex had a job, I started ironing every Sunday evening. I had never ironed all my clothes before. But taking up the habit of ironing a load of laundry as a weekly chore was a comforting ritual that made me feel a little bit in control in an otherwise very unstable environment. 

Similarly, my first husband was the quintessential east coast, highly educated liberal. He could fairly have been described as a male feminist. I used to think myself lucky that he was in touch with his feminine side and I didn’t have to contend with those (I thought at the time) hard-to-manage masculine traits. When he was a child, his mother worked hard to remove every danger — real and imagined — from his path. His outward presentation was very much in line with the intellectual, bohemian family I was raised in. Turns out, though, that his years of therapy and self-examination, his artistic sensibility and life expectations did not provide the kind of grit a person needs to pull themselves out of a deep hole. Not even the love of his beautiful son could give him the strength to vanquish his demons. My second husband is from a totally different background to my own. In his childhood, the men laboured and the women stayed home and raised children, and threat of one kind or another was omnipresent. He has been the one to provide safety, stability and warmth to me and my son.  

So my ability to see the value in order and traditional gender roles (i.e., conservative positions) was hard-earned and I come by it honestly. If that makes me a conservative in the eyes of some, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter.

Fundamentally, none of this is really political. The media has created the impression that we are divided on political issues, but these disagreements go deeper than that. The business of politics is a grasping, horse-trading, mostly dishonest enterprise. It will never be able to address these questions of fundamental reality. We are going to have to work this one out for ourselves.